• masquenox@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Modern-day fascists are desperate to distance themselves from the nazis, despite the fact that the nazis are literally their idols.

    • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Wait, do people really care if Nazis were left or right-wing?

      Their leader was a racist mass murderer with superiority complex, who cares about his political views?

      Let’s say they were left-wing… Does that make the left wing Nazis? Mmm no. If a dictator is right-wing, does that make the right-wing dictators? No.

      Do people understand these are two unrelated things? Imagine seeing a dog owner cheating on his wife and assuming all dog owners are cheaters.

      • Angel Jamie@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        The caveat is that being a “racist mass murderer with a superiority complex” is a very right-wing thing. It wouldn’t be possible to fit that mold and be leftist because it’s entirely incompatible with leftist ideology.

        • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          I don’t understand why someone would bring up that being right-wing does not make one a nazi unless they were right-wing and felt like the type of person who is at risk of being called a nazi.

          That being said, in reference to your commenr: in America it is as you say. Elsewhere in the world it’s a bit more complicated. Left and Right originally referred to the sides of the French National Assembly, who either supported the king or the revolution. In some uses it just means people who support liberal economics (more funding) or conservative economics (less debt).

          Most people would agree that communism is a left-wing ideology, but there have been famous communist leaders that were racist, mass-murdering and/or with superiority complexes (the famous examples of Che Guevara, Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot all fit some of those criteria each).

        • Iam_Cat@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Did you just seriously say that there has never been a left wing racist mass murderer with a superiority complex?

            • Duamerthrax@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Certainly been a few waving the flag of socialism/communism that have lead to those consequences.

              • cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                It’s not uncommon for fascists to adopt socialist rhetoric to try and gain mass appeal. However that falls away under the lightest scrutiny of their actions and ideology. “National Socialism” is the most obvious example. I’d include Pol Pot in that bucket as well.

                The USSR under Stalin and PRC under Mao are a bit different. The government in either case made decisions that led to unnecessary death, but there’s no evidence to suggest any of their missteps were motivated by racial animus.

                • Duamerthrax@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Mao’s Great Leap Forward was him trying to push Communist ideology onto nature. He had one hammer in his tool box and tried using it on everything.

        • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          So you’re saying that racism and mass murder did not exist under communist China?

          What about Russification in the Soviet Union? Minorities were marginalized.

          Why would it be a problem if the Nazis were actually left-wing? You’re not realizing you’re actually a victim of a fallacy. And even more concerning, you’re trying to use the same fallacy to attack back. It’s just flawed logic all over the place.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              What? I’m just saying that being racist or a murderer is totally unrelated to political views. Those can happen in both the left and right.

              Guys, you’re smarter than this. For real.

                • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  I said it doesn’t matter if the Nazis were right wing or left wing, what matters is that they were criminals. Then that person said that mass murder and racism is only aligned with the right, so I showed him/her that that is wrong, murder and racism can also happen on the left.

                  The point being that just because in the past there were rotten apples in the left/right, it doesn’t mean that being in the left/right makes you a rotten apple.

                  • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    I said it doesn’t matter if the Nazis were right wing or left wing

                    And you’re completely wrong. They absolutely were right wing, and teaching history accurately matters.

                    The point being that just because in the past there were rotten apples in the left/right, it doesn’t mean that being in the left/right makes you a rotten apple.

                    Except for one little thing: Republicans are calling for the eradication of vulnerable minorities and then pretending that they’re not acting like nazis and using the lie that nazis were left wing as justification.

                  • BaumGeist@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    The Nazis weren’t criminals, they followed the rules exquisitely. It’s just that they used their politics to put themselves in positions to change the rules.

                    It also is important, if we’re to learn from history, to know that the nazis were favored for their conservative (right-wing) economics and their pro-worker (left-wing) rhetoric, but their actions were mostly defined by their fascism (a far right-wing economic and social philosophy).

                    Ignoring this is a great way to create a blind-spot that treats any group with fascist tendencies as perfectly safe as long as they’re not actively doing a genocide yet.

                    On the other hand, i do understand and agree with what you’re saying to some degree: the Left/Right divide is mostly rhetoric of divisiveness and quickly becomes a shorthand for “people with morally correct beliefs (people who agree with every single political belief I have and whom i will uncritically adopt more political stances from)” and “people with morally evil beliefs (people who disagree with every single one of my political beliefs and whom i will uncritically adopt the opposite stances of).”

                    This too creates a blindspot where people just assume their chosen team is incapable of morally heinous acts and will also ignore historical fact in order to maintain that dissonance, incidentally recreating the conditions that allow such abusers to rise to positions of power.

          • Didros@beehaw.org
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            1 year ago

            As I understand it the keystone between left and right is that:
            The left belief is that all people are created equal and should have equal authority to point out wrong doing. The right belief is that people should be in a hierarchy with people at the top exerting control downward.

            I think they are actually just saying if you really believe everyone is equal you can’t pick a group to target for mass murder. But if you are at the top of a pyramid tge people below you naturally look expendable.

            At least that is my reading of this debate.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              And my point was that even in the left, murder, discrimination and racism can exist.

              People just choose to think their position is ideal and the opposition is flawed. This type of brainwashing is disgusting.

              • Didros@beehaw.org
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                1 year ago

                Correct, and my point was that they can’t. If you view everyone as equal you can’t make yourself a dictator. You can lie to yourself about your value, most people do for better or worse. But if everyone is equal you can’t decide to boost one group over another. Or if you do decide that is better and you deserve to be in charge, then your views have shifted right. That is my understanding of left vs right in it’s most basic form.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yeha, tell that to the North Korean God, Kim, who rises above everyone while keeping everyone else equal.

        • tomi000@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Hilarious how people who know exactly one “racist mass murderer with a superiority complex” assume that it is a right-wing thing. Try humanities most famous left-winger ever.

          Im not saying that nazis and right-wing are unrelated, but you picked exactly those characteristics in Hitler that actually arent related to political views at all.

      • tomi000@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Thats not the point, youre twisting the order. Every nazi is right-wing, by definition. Not every right-winger is a nazi and thats not what people are saying. A big part of nazi ideology is overlapping with general right-wing ideologies, they are separate but not unrelated at all.

        • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          You don’t understand. What I’m saying is that you shouldn’t care about it. Do you care if the North Korean dictator is left-wing? No? Good, you shouldn’t. The same way you shouldn’t care if Nazis were right-wing.

          • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I’d argue that you should very much care about the political alignment of extremist leaders, because it show you where an ideology can ultimately lead to if left unchecked. As the poster above said, it doesn’t mean that all right-wing people are nazis, but knowing the nazis were right-wing shows you where a right-wing government can end up if the wrong set of conditions happen to come along. This is important information, as you can spot the warning signs as they appear and (hopefully) nip it in the bud before it gets to that point.

            • R0cket_M00se@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              You could literally replace all this with “left wing” and use “communism” incorrectly instead of fascism (which isn’t just dictatorship, it was also a set of economic and societal philosophies invented by the fascisti of Italy) because at the end of the day, both sides of the political aisle have the same tendency to go extremist authoritarian when allowed.

              • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                There has been no non-authoritarian state of existence of humans inside any civilisation. None. Liberals/centrists playing this bullshit trope of feudalism or anarchism or some dreamy impossible organisation of society with literally zero hierarchy, is impossible. Direct democracy works at best on a scale of a small village. If we go by Dunbar’s number, no bigger than a group of 148 people can have direct relations.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              They are behaving like Nazis regardless of if the Nazis were right-wing or left-wing. Nazi behavior can happen in the left or the right. As I already said, discrimination, murder, superiority complex, racism and exploration has also happened in left-wing systems.

              • CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                Of course bad things happen at the extremes of both sides, but I’m going to have to object to “regardless of if the Nazis were right-wing or left-wing.” I don’t think there’s really room to equivocate on that - nazism is right-wing.

                • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  It is. Just like fascism, these are terms associated with the right-wing. But that’s not my point… My point is that whatever affiliation the right or left had in the past does not necessarily represent the current affiliations. The fact that the US right-wing is turning to white supremacy is unrelated to Nazis being right wing. That is just a reflection of their systemic racism.

                  What I’m saying is that it is irrelevant if Republicans are trying to associate the left with Nazis, because even if such association existed, it is not a valid argument to say that the left today is ruled by Nazis, or that the right can’t behave like Nazis. That’s just a fallacy, the same fallacy that they use to point out that voting left will turn us into North Korea or an authoritarian left-wing dictatorship.

                  I can’t believe people aren’t getting this. It’s like they don’t understand I’m actually pro-left with this argument, somehow they think I’m protecting Nazis and Republicans because I’m not shouting “REPUBLICANS BAD!”

                  Going back and pointing out how Nazis were right-wing is something that will bite the left in the ass because there are plenty of examples of the left turning into shit too. So instead of comparing with past examples, just analyze their current positions. Is the right currently behaving like Nazis? Yes. Do you need WWII Nazis to be right wing for this to be a fact? No. So even if they convince people that Nazis were left wing, how does that disprove that RIGHT NOW they are the racists and white supremacists?

                  I’m just saying, don’t play their games.

          • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Do you care if the North Korean dictator is left-wing?

            Kim Jong-Un is right wing. So were Kim Jong Il, Kim Il Sung, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Xi, and Che Guevara. In fact, they were all moderate Republicans whose ideas are 100% in line with the current Republican Party platform. There’s no daylight at all between any of them and Ronald Wilson Reagan.

            Before you respond, remember that you don’t care what their politics are because it doesn’t matter.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              Dafuq, North Korea is left wing. OK, so was the Soviet Union also right wing when they marginalized minorities through Russification?

              “if it is bad, it is right-wing”.

              And yes, my whole point is that the fact North Korea has a left-wing dictatorship doesn’t mean that all left-wing parties will become dictatorships. You finally got my point, damn, it took you so long.

                • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Ah ok, as I said, “everything that is left wing is good and paradise. Everything right wing is pure evil”.

                  In a left-wing state the state always holds the power… So once that state becomes corrupted and uses that power to keep all workers equally poor, then it is suddenly right wing? Show me what were the capitalist principles in the Soviet Union? Was there a free market, private incentive, private property, competition, minimal state intervention, entrepreneurship, individual rights and freedoms? NOOO THERE WEREN’T. It wasn’t a right-wing state.

                  You guys are insane. Lemmy became an echo chamber for your delusions. It’s really sad to see people this radicalized.

                  A dictator is a dictator, who the fuck cares if they are right or left wing? A racist is a racist. A murderer is a murderer. They can be found in any side of the political spectrum, but you’re too biased to believe the left can be corrupted… You are too blinded by what is right and what is left and are totally unable to see there can be combinations of ideologies.

                  You say dictators are right wing because they don’t follow some left-wing principles? Then I could argue that all dictators are left-wing because by definition the right strives to minimize government controls, and a dictatorship is authoritarian, which goes against right-wing policies… But I’m done arguing. This is my last Lemmy comment. You are so blinded by the left vs right argument you can’t see beyond that. This degree of fanatism can’t be healthy, I don’t want to become radicalized like you people. This self imposed blindness is sad and pathetic. Good bye.

          • subverted_per@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            I feel like you’re being deliberately obtuse. You’re right in that by itself trying to define the nazi party of the past in terms of present day left/right ideology is reductivist, and unproductive in discourse. But you’re ignoring two important facts in the present day right/left dynamic. First that literal modern day nazis have shown a distinct preference for right wing ideaology. Second is that fascism as an ideology is a chameleon that latches onto present day conflict to unite people through oppression of a weak other, which is the basis for present day right wing policy. As such the comparison becomes apt because the fascists of the past are a model for the fascists of the present.

            • pazukaza@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              OK, by that same logic the left-wing dictators and collapsed systems of the past are a model for the present. So is the right justified to push fear with those past examples to show how bad the left is?

              Do you see that’s just the same flawed logic they use to scare people away from the left?

      • Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Their leader was a racist mass murderer with superiority complex, who cares about his political views?

        People who know that his political views included “we should use the state to enforce racism” and “mass murder is ok.”

      • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        Let me clarify. To be crystal clear, we’re talking about “left” and right on the political compass. It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the most well known one. Overall, “left” and “right” are bizarre terminologies with aqueous meanings deeply embedded in history.

        You are technically correct if you are talking about the political compass. we call “authoritarian left” “Stalinism” and we call “libertarian right” “anarcho-capitalism” or just “libertarianism” in the US.

        The problem is that all philosophy founding “leftist ideology” has consistently been “libertarian left”, focusing on collapsing hierarchies, dividing power into many hands, and dismantling power structures (such as currency). Anarchism is basically the prime example.

        With Marx’s communism, his end game is a system without any government, where people simply exchange services and collaborate to create only what they want or need (not to endlessly proliferate waste for profit). Even his “dictatorship of the proletariat”, one of the stepping stones to communism, is a democratic system. It is called a “dictatorship” because it revokes the voting rights of the rich.

        To boot, the ideologies which exist in the “authoritarian left” and “libertarian right” are full of contradictions and mental gymnastics. They all swear they’re communist but make no attempts to actually disseminate power, or gear towards a more democratic system, directly going against Marx’s ideals.

        Because of this, pretty much every leftist agrees that the “authoritarian left” are not leftist, because they directly betray the philosophy which founds leftist beliefs.

        SO to conclude, there is literally no world where someone can genuinely believe the various philosophies within leftism while at the same time starting a campaign alienating minorities, appealing to the general population with populism and returning the state to a former glory, and embarking on a Nazi take-over. This is why Nazism and leftism are completely incompatible, and why literally no Authoritarian can be considered a leftist.